Thlog #2

      This week we had our first writing project. I felt very prepared for this assignment, due to the previous two project builders that we wrote last week. I felt that I had a significant understanding for genre conventions after exploring the conventions that surrounded the scientific papers, memes, and comic strips that were evident through the online genre generator websites. It also helped that one of my project builders had explored the conventions surrounding Yik Yak, because for my writing project I focused on social media as my genre. Although for this project I concentrated entirely on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook— I realized that minus the few varying features of each site that is made to make the social media site appear more unique—the genre as a whole shares immense similarities. If you took a post from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and did not include what site that they were posted on, they would look almost identical, since they have the same underlying motive, which is to communicate within one’s society in a more relaxed manner. I found the article from the course reader, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis” by Laura Bolin Carroll, to be the most relatable and useful for my writing project. This was because the beginning of the article focused on implications of rhetorical analysis within the media. The article discussed the importance of understanding the rhetorical messages within social media sites as a way to better understand just how our society is affected.